An Irish Rail employee has spoken of the constant abuse he faces on the job from angry passengers.
Kieran said he's been threatened with various acts of violence while working for the national transport service. One passenger threatened to burn Kieran's house with his family in it because he was stopped from bringing livestock on the train.
Kieran said: "There’s no livestock allowed on this train. He had two big boxes of five turkeys all together. This was during Covid."
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Kieran said he's been threatened with a stabbing, spat at, verbally abused, and hit on the arm. "It's nothing too major but you’re going into work knowing your day could be good or you could have someone threatening you," he told The Hard Shoulder on Newstalk.
The Irish Rail worker said he has received a lot of abuse from teenagers who refuse to pay for a train ticket. He added that one of his colleagues was attacked on the platform and hit by a crutch.
Kieran said that while the conversation usually starts out politely, it quickly takes an abusive turn if a passenger without a ticket is asked to leave the train. When asked if dedicated transport police could be a solution to the growing issue, Kieran said dedicated gardai on site would "be perfect for it".
"I worked on British Rail years ago and they have transport police and I never saw any trouble on British Rail and I worked there for just over two years."
Back in July Dublin Live reported that nine Irish Rail staff have been assaulted in Dublin and 21 nationwide over the past 18 months. A report released under the Freedom of Information Act 2014 shows that staff faced assaults both on board services and at stations across the country.
In the capital, assaults occurred at Ashtown, Howth Junction, Balbriggan, Fairview Ramp, Pearse, Rush and Lusk and twice at Connolly. An assault also took place on board a DART service.
General secretary of the National Bus and Rail Union Dermot O'Leary said that politicians need to focus on the "creation of a dedicated garda unit on public transport".
He told Dublin Live: "We have called for this for a while. The experience in other jurisdictions where they have a police force, see that anti social incidents are driven down year on year.
"The existence of a garda unit on public transport would, we believe, deter a lot of people from some of this behaviour."
A spokesman for Irish Rail recently told Dublin Live that they have recently introduced a series of measures to combat anti-social behaviour and violence towards staff.
He said: "Any acts or threat of violence towards our employees are condemned by Iarnrod Eireann, and no worker in any industry should experience this. In all instances, we will work with Gardaí to bring the perpetrators to justice."
He said Irish Rail have introduced multiple measures to combat anti-social behaviour, including increasing their security resources from €3.7m in 2016 to €5.7m in 2021. The rail network also said they have strengthened their work with gardai and established joint protocols particularly on the DART, Heuston commuter and Cork routes.
The spokesman added that a dedicated security monitoring centre for the Greater Dublin Area has been established as well as a DART text alert line to report incidents of anti social behaviour.
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